On Feature Requests
If I had asked my customers what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse
—Henry Ford
Posted by Olly on September 17, 2008 at 8:48 am in quotations
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@media London 2008 round-up. Day 2
Free beer is great. Until the morning after.
Nate Koechley, front-end engineer with Yahoo, was up first with today’s keynote. Nate is another good speaker and this was a interesting talk, explaining front-end engineering and discussing a whole bunch of performance tips and tricks, approaches to unit testing. Stuff like that.
Jonathan Snook, in Building on the Shoulders of Giants, talked about frameworks, APIs, Flash. I didn’t really take much away from this to be honest.
Next up I had track-indecision: a choice between John Resig (Mr. jQuery) talking about JS libraries or a ‘For Example’ session by The Guardian and Dopplr. I plumped for the example session but it was totally underwhelming. Marc Pacheco from The Guardian took about 10 minutes to discuss how they have separate 8 CSS files in development which get merged into one in production and how he once merged two CSS files in Subversion and put it live, seemingly without checking, resulting in missing content. I think he might need a copy of Beyond Compare. The Dopplr talk was a bit more interesting from a startup point of view, but I didn’t take much away from it really. I did find out that guardian.co.uk runs off a bespoke CMS written in Java and is served by Resin and Apache, which my inner geek found quite interesting.
In the afternoon the Communicating Best Practices panel had it’s moments, but Exploring the Server Side: Rails & Django by James Adam (from Revoo) and Simon Willison was far better. James did a brave live demo of Rails, which (bearing in mind I’m a Rails developer) I thought was really well explained, whilst Simon talked about how he replicated the @media website in Django which was actually quite outstanding. I didn’t know much about Django (or Python) beforehand, but now I have a much better picture and I’m so glad I use Ruby and Rails ;-)
The day finished, as did Day 1, with a ‘hot topics’ panel which was really quite dull. I’d much rather have two more solid presentations than these camp fire chats. I think they can work really well at smaller events like Highland Fling, but on this scale they’re always a bit unfulfilling.
I wouldn’t say it was a vintage @media year, but it was really enjoyable and I met some really great people. The venue, the Queen Elizabeth Hall, on the south bank was just about perfect — really good acoustics (obviously) in the theatres, comfy seats with lots of space, massive socialising area with good food and drink all day. All that and only one tube stop from my house — nice!
Same again next year?
Posted by Olly on May 31, 2008 at 8:11 am in @media, atmedia, conference and tagged with @media, @media2008, atmeda, atmedia2008, london
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@media London 2008 round-up. Day 1
I’d really love to write an insightful, in-depth review of @media London 2008. Instead, here’s a bumbling, quick-fire round-up of my thoughts from this years’ @media conference in London.
Jeff Veen kicks off the proceedings with a keynote. Jeff was a great choice for this — he’s a really good speaker. I saw him speak at both @media 2006 and dContruct2006 and they were both highlights for me. It’s just a shame that two years on this presentation contained so much of the same material.
Following Jeff was Indi Young, once a colleague of his from Adaptive Path. Indi was talking about Mental Models and I honestly didn’t get this at all. It’s all about talking to your users and collating the information, then creating 10 foot long diagrams or vast walls of sticky notes. I’m sure this is really valuable stuff for enterprise-size companies looking to splash the cash, but somehow I think @media wasn’t really the right audience for it.
Following this I went to Getting Your Hands Dirty with HTML5. It was interesting, and extending the HTML spec does make a lot of sense, but I think most people were left with the feeling that it just isn’t going to happen any time soon. Modern browsers might start supporting it in the next couple of years, but since a huge number of people are still using the 7-year old IE6… Well, you know.
I’ve seen Andy Clarke speak quite a few times now and his talks are always entertaining and insightful. This session, called Underpants Over my Trousers, showed how Andy took his comic book passion and used it as inspiration for a design for a newspaper who wanted ’something a bit different’. That’s certainly what they got! I think the content management developers at said newspaper will have had a heart attack when they saw the solution, but hey, that wasn’t the point! Some really good examples of tight CSS too.
My favourite talk of the day was Dan Rubin’s Designing User Interfaces: Details Make the Difference. Dan is an excellent speaker, and I’m a stickler for detail, so this was like my perfect talk. Discussing proportion (so obvious yet so overlooked, by me anyway), typography, kerning, grids, textures, subtlety and depth, this is exactly the sort of talk I attend conferences like this for. Inspiring stuff.
Posted by Olly on at 7:40 am in conference and tagged with @media, @media2008, atmedia, atmedia2008, london
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Java Quote of the Day
So what’s happening? Java 7 is happening. And I encourage you all to go look at that train wreck, because oh my God. Oh, God. I didn’t sleep last night. I’m all wired right now because I looked at Java 7 last night. And it was a mistake.
Posted by Olly on May 12, 2008 at 8:41 am in java, quotations
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Computers need a weekend too
Companies House sets a new standard for the availability of online services:
Posted by Olly on April 7, 2008 at 11:21 am in whatever and tagged with companieshouse
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